Great Time Management - Planning

Planning...
An Integral Part of Time Management

Every time management course you have ever taken has told you to schedule your weekly activities at the beginning of the week. Don't Do It! At least not until you have spent some time planning each activity. By planning your tasks well, often you will reduce the amount of time required by as much as 50%.

Time management may be frustrating to you when you schedule activities and then are not able to complete them because you didn’t consider the following three interrelated components:

• The full scope of the activity
• The resources needed to accomplish the activity
• The time required to complete the activity

Time management courses are dead on when they instruct you to schedule your activities ahead of time. Some tasks need to be scheduled weeks or even months ahead depending upon the plan developed around these components. Hopefully, this time management article will show you the importance of planning before scheduling.

The following explanation of these time management components should give you a basic understanding of their role in developing your weekly calendar.

The Full Scope – The scope of the activity or task identifies what the end result will look like, the steps and their sequence necessary to go from start to finish and how to measure successful completion of the task.

The Resources Needed

• People: If other people will be involved you will need to think about who to involve, how and when to communicate with them and the coordination of your schedules.
• Tools: You will need to consider the tools that may be required, their availability and expertise required to use them.
• Materials: Usually, your tasks will require materials of some type. Of course, you will want to know their exact description, availability and where to find them.
• Funding: If any of these parts have a cost related to them you will need to acquire adequate financing for them.

The Time Required – Time management is all about estimating the amount time required to complete each task. By having thought out the scope of the activity or task and knowing some detail about the resources required to fulfill the obligation you can develop a more accurate estimate of the time you will need.

This time management tip may seem like a no brainer. You might expect everyone to do this before scheduling time on a calendar but you would be surprised at how often these three steps are overlooked. It’s no wonder so many people feel overwhelmed by their work load.

Spend a little time planning your work and cut the time needed in half.

Now that’s Great Time Management.

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Article by John Golden